Iwoke with a foul taste in my mouth—stale coffee—and that sluggish feeling a bad dream leaves in its wake. A Dexedrine cleared out the cobwebs. Ben saw me swallow it.
“I take a lot of pills too,” he said. “Vasodilators and calcium blockers every day for high blood pressure, along with a piss pill. It runs in the family. My old man had it. What’s your problem?”
“Prostate,” I told him. “The old fart’s malady. They say that every man who doesn’t die of something else first will end up with it. Fortunately it’s a slow-growing malignancy,” I lied. “I’ll probably croak from something else before it gets into my bones or lungs or colon, but it’s inconvenient as hell.”
“You’ve got. . . cancer?”
I nodded.
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me? Shouldn’t you be in the hospital? I thought you looked a bit fragile but figured it for jet lag. You shouldn’t be paddling . . . ”
“Lay off me, Ben. I feel just fine. If it hadn’t been for the PSA test and the biopsy, I wouldn’t even know I had it. Look, you just saw me wading wet in a fast cold current, fishing upstream for half an hour . . . ”
“It was more like an hour and half,” he said. He shrugged and nodded. “Okay, I guess I overreacted. But that’s a scary word.”
“Tell me about it.”
The spinners were already working over the water, dancing up and down, glinting like flecks of bronze in the softening afternoon light, weaving their webs of airborne sexual magic. They mate in midair, then the females dive down like tiny kamikazes to drop their eggs in the current. Afterward they die, drifting downstream like so many miniature Ophelias. I’d like to think that they sing sweet crazy pastorales as they float to their collective doom, insect lyrics inaudible to human ears, way above the range of the saxophone or else I’d try it. Maybe I’d try it anyway. How else to explain the sadness of an autumn afternoon?
But trout aren’t sentimentalists. They feed on these moribund damsels like the opportunists they are—that Nature has bred them to be. Already a few were working the spinner fall. Small trout leaped high to snag low flyers, others slashed the surface in quick little takes, slurping down whole rafts of the spent, clear-winged, rust-bodied victims. It was still too bright for the big trout to feed. But the sun was about to disappear behind the spruce and cedar of the western skyline.
We walked down the bank to the far end of the run. This time I wore waders. The cold of the afternoon’s expedition seemed to have chilled me to the marrow. Too much California, I told myself. Too many trips to the Baja. You live in a bland climate, your blood’s getting thin . . .
Bullshit. Don’t kid yourself. It’s the cancer at work.
We reached the end of the pool. “You had all the fun this afternoon,” I told Ben, “watching me warm and dry from the shore while I beat my brains out on that big rainbow. So it’s only fair that you should get in the water first this time. I could use a few laughs.”
“Get ready to chuckle.”
He waded out to midstream, heavy-legged in his chest waders, and started searching for risers. Ben had a slow, easy stroke to his casts, the classic metronome, and I followed the loops of his pale green flyline hissing esses in the sunset. It was hypnotic. He dropped the fly—a rusty spinner—about sixty feet up and across from where he stood. So soft a touch that there was no splash. The fly drifted less than a foot before it was taken. He tightened and raised his rod tip. A quick leap, two more, then he took the trout on the reel and brought it in, easing the fish away from the feeding line so as not to alarm the others. He released it and started casting again, air-drying the fly as he eased back out toward the far bank.
He took half a dozen more trout on his next six casts, easy as pie, then reeled up and waded back to the bank where I was sitting in the last random beams of sunlight.
“Your turn, Hairball,” he said.
“Any size to them?”
“Ten to fourteen inches, but peppy little devils, full of bounce.”
“I could see that from here.”
“The big trout should start working soon, sometime within the next half hour,” he said. “Maybe you’ll tag that guy who gave you conniptions earlier.”
But I didn’t. Oh, I caught and released maybe eight or ten fish, all rainbows, but none of any real size. It got darker and darker. Colder and colder. Then, on my last backcast, I picked up a bat. He must have been cruising for the last of the spinning mayflies, and he hit my fly so hard that he made the reel sing. He flew off with it until the weight of the line slapped him down on the water.
I hate it when they do that. Not that I’m fearful of bats, but rather that I have too deep a liking for them. Ugly little fellows when you study them up close, but miracles of evolution—die Fledermaus, a German word that also means a flighty woman.
I reeled the drowning bat in and flipped him up on the near bank with my free hand. He was panting, poor little guy. I knelt beside him for a moment.
Ben and Jake walked down to where I was kneeling. “Are you going to give him mouth to mouth, Doc?”
“No, smartass, I just want to see how deep he took the fly.” It was hooked in the corner of the bat’s mouth, painful I’m sure but far from mortal. I reached down and clipped it loose with the scissors attached to my vest, just above the knot, taking care that he didn’t nip me. I didn’t dare pick him up in a bare hand and try to remove the barbless hook with the needlenose grips. Even with an easy touch I might have crushed his bones. He’d throw the fly soon enough when he got airborne, just a few quick loops and chandelles should do it.
We went back a few steps and watched in the dying light until the bat flew away.
“You’re getting to be a gentle soul, aren’t you?” Ben said in a quiet, serious voice. “I don’t mean that sarcastically. I’m not ribbing you. But you are.”
The question took me aback. Was I going soft? Or perhaps this trip was rekindling gentler emotions that I hadn’t felt since high school.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I have a sympathy for life, I guess, if that’s what ‘gentle’ means. Maybe it comes with age. But you’re a softy too it would seem. No trout for supper?”
“Think again, pal.” He reached down into the grass and pulled up a stringer full of trout, stocky little ten inchers. “I’m not averse to killing a few fish now and then for a special occasion. I just don’t want to kill all of them. Found these guys down at the tail of the pool while you were battling Count Dracula and they were too good to pass up. Just tiddlers, yes, but they’ll taste mighty sweet from the frying pan.”
Yes, they did. And it was a special occasion, I now realized. This trip was changing both of us for the better, bringing me back into a world more real than arid, success-driven California, and weaning Ben from self-pity and the bottle.
I stayed up late again that night, trying the capture the music of the spinner dance on my horn. I wasn’t fast enough to do it justice, but some nice sounds emerged anyway—quick up-and-down riffs punctuated with buggy orgasmic flights in the lower registers, followed by sad melodic passages as the spent females drifted away downstream. But this number needed a quartet at least to do it justice—a light, quick keyboard for the braided sound of the river, John Lewis in his prime would do; a guttural trumpet for the climaxes (Diz at his best); Max Roach to mix the tempo; with the Prez and his tenor sax for the Lady Ophelia songs. I imagined the soloes as I sketched them out—the mind’s ear connects straight to the tear ducts, and my eyes began to blur.
After a while I put the horn aside and watched the river race past. Large mayflies were spinning in the moonlight just below the riffle, twice the size of the baetis we’d seen during daylight hours. One of them fluttered to the bank and lit on my hand. I recognized it at once—an old friend of my youth, the White-Gloved Howdy. This outsized ephemerid is technically a subspecies of Isonychia—I. Bicolor—but its happier name derives from its forelegs. They’re extra long for a mayfly and bonewhite toward the front end—what would correspond to the gloved hands and wrists of a Victorian gentleman caller.
Then I heard a sound from the top of the pool. Ker-chung! A big fish on the take. It was my nemesis from the early afternoon—had to be. The trout was feeding in the exact same lie. The rise rings spread as if someone had dropped a depth charge. I grabbed my flybox and searched it for a howdy match. The only extralong fly I had was a Hex tie, a mahogany-bodied imago of Hexagenia limbata, the so-called Michigan caddis, with long hyaline wings tied flat. It was big enough, a long-shanked No. 8, so it’d be worth the effort.
We’d been fishing 5X tippets to the baetis, with a breaking point of no more than two pounds. I’d need a sturdier length of terminal line than that, both to throw this fly accurately and to handle a really big trout if I could get one to take. Now I rummaged around in Ben’s tackle bag and found a spool of ten-pound-test monofilament. I clipped off the old tippet back to heavier line, barrel-knotted the new long tippet to it, taking special care to ensure that the turns were wrapped tight, and greased the whole length with floatant. In situations like this it’s unforgiveable to allow the leader to sink the fly.
The big ’bow was feeding steadily now, in heavy, hollow, headlong splashes that echoed back to me from the far bank. Lesser trout were on the take too, all up and down the pool. No time for waders. I thought of waking Ben—he’d never forgive me if he missed this feeding frenzy—but that would take too long. These late-season falls of big mayfly spinners were over almost before they began. I slid down the near bank and crouched low as I angled my way across the slippery gravel. He was working in the shadow line of moonlight, close to the head of the pool. I squatted down, chest-deep in the current, and stripped line from the reel, enough—I hoped—to reach him with only one backcast.
I threw.
The fly blipped on the water, three feet ahead of him. I watched it swirl once, then drift down over him. He took it with the impact of a .375 H&H Magnum, a solid, no-nonsense hit that hooked him with its very velocity. He jumped high, shaking his head, gill plates rattling like a tarpon’s, then jumped again—three, four, five times. He bored off up through the rapids and line melted off my reel. I couldn’t turn him.
I’d have to follow or he’d spool me in no time. As I scrambled up through the rushing water and slippery boulders of the whitewater, holding the rod high over my head, I heard a shout from the campsite. I glanced back. Ben was standing there in his skivvies, with Jake beside him, pumping his right arm up and down. “Go, go, go!” Maybe I shouted on the hookup and woke him, or maybe he’d been watching me all along. But I didn’t have time to yell back. I was too busy keeping my footing and fighting the onrushing current.
You’re too old for this, Doc . . .
Somehow I made it up through the rapids though and into the slower water. The trout by now had taken me well into the backing. My knuckles were white on the corks, my hand cramping, I’d fallen twice, banged elbows to a high screeching tingle, and scuffed my shins on boulders. I’d lost one of my sneakers along the way. But unless the hook pulled out, I had him now.
Jake came running up the shoreline with Ben behind him, carrying a long-handled landing net. Ten minutes later we scooped him into its meshes. His heaving sides gleamed silver in the moonlight. A tiny, well-shaped head, broad shoulders, and a tail that looked a handspan wide from top to bottom.
“He’s two feet long if he’s an inch,” Ben said. “And look at the girth of him—he’s got to go eight pounds anyway, maybe closer to ten.”
“Too much trout for us to eat before the meat goes bad,” I said. “Let’s try a little streamside CPR.”
It took both of us to hold him upright into the current, kneedeep in the Firesteel, moving him gently back and forth until he righted himself. Blood was flowing down my shins, trailing off in black tendrils downstream. The trout tasted some of it on a back eddy, then sprang back to life. He rolled his eyes at us and zoomed away like an Exocet missile, into the darkness he’d sprung from.